SEMI produced its May book-to-bill figures for the North American semiconductor equipment industry. Bookings were $1.08bn and billings $0.862bn, giving a ratio of 1.26. The bookings were up 50% up on May 2001 and billings down 41%. April's book-to-bill was 1.22. VLSI Research confused matters for some by releasing its own

Recently FCC-approved Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology nodes will account for
5% of the total wireless home networking market in 2006, according to
In-Stat/MDR. The first UWB end-products are expected late next year, in time
for the gift-giving season. These are forecast to be aimed at the personal
area network (PAN) environment with speeds at 100Mbits/sec. Fabless company
XtremeSpectrum is planning to have chipsets available later this year. Other
companies planning UWB products are Time Domain and General Atomics.
However, the dominant home networking technology up to 2006 is expected to
be based on the IEEE 802.11x standards.

The Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) video chip maket is expected to
reach $3.3bn and 272m units in 2006, according to In-Stat/MDR. Last year,
the market languished at $1bn and 112m units. The market composition is
expected to be more weighted in future towards the HD MPEG-2 decoder, MPEG-4
and MPEG-2 encoder segments. The leading company in 2001 was Europe's
STMicroelectronics with $392m in revenues. This was the company's fourth
year on top. ESS Technology was the leader in terms of unit shipments (34m).
LSI Logic came second in both categories. These three companies account for
more than 70% of the market.

Gartner Dataquest puts the decline in the photoresist market in 2001 at 23%,
resulting in $663m revenues. The No.1 company in the market is Tokyo Ohka
Kogyo with $150.1m revenues, down 30.7%. Other companies in the top five are
Shipley ($139.2m, -20.3%), JSR ($117.6m, -15.0%), Shin-Etsu Chemical
($70.1m, -5.5%), Arch Chemicals ($63.7m, -24.3%).

VLSI Research released its "10 Best" semiconductor equipment supplier
customer rankings. The leaders of the five categories were Tegal (small
wafer processing equipment suppliers, 8.26 rating), Ebara (large wafer
processing equipment suppliers, 8.03), SUSS MicroTec (test & material
handling, 7.96), Agilent Technologies (process diagnostics, 8.28) and
Datacon Technology (assembly, 8.23). Apart from SUSS, already mentioned,
other European companies making a showing were:
* small wafer processing, No.2 SUSS (7.69), No.4 SEZ (7.25), No.6 Aixtron
(7.02), No.8 Unaxis (6.70), No.10 Oxford Instruments PT (6.32)
* large wafer processing - No.4 ASM International (7.40), No.9 ASML (6.87)
* test & material handling - No.3 SZ Testsyteme (7.65), No.6 Schlumberger
(7.38)
* process diagnostics - No.2 Schlumberger (7.75), No.6 Philips Analytical
(6.61)
* assembly - No.3 ASM International (8.18), No.5 Alphasem (8.07), No.6 SUSS
MicroTec (7.82), No.10 ICOS Vision Systems (7.41)
VLSI has introduced two new categories - focused suppliers and large
suppliers. Tegal won the focused group (8.26) and ASM International the
large group (7.90).

VLSI Research has ranked chip equipment companies according to Q1 sales. The
top five are: Applied Materials ($1.052bn), Tokyo Electron ($0.581bn), Nikon
($0.364bn), KLA-Tencor ($0.353) and ASML ($0.341bn). The total sales of
other companies in the market came to $4.090bn.

AMD joined Intel (Bulletin 436, June 10, 2002) in blaming poor European PC
sales for an anticipated "substantial operating loss" in Q2. Sales
expectations have been reduced from $820-900m to $620-700m. North American
PC sales are also a source of weakness.